Listen to ‘The Daily’: The Dilemma for Red-State Democrats

How the showdown over the Supreme Court is affecting crucial midterm races in the nation’s heartland.

U.S. ambassador to U.N. steps down

President Trump’s ambassador to the U.N., Nikki Haley, resigned this morning, an unexpected move that leaves the White House with one moderate voice fewer on the administration’s foreign policy team.

Ms. Haley, a former governor of South Carolina, had been an early and frequent critic of Mr. Trump, so her appointment was seen as an olive branch. During Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign, she sharply criticized his demeanor and warned what it might mean for American diplomacy — even suggesting he could cause a world war.

• “Big announcement”: That’s what Mr. Trump promised on Twitter, referring to his scheduled appearance with Ms. Haley at the White House at 10:30 a.m.

Fears of a domino effect on climate

But the dire report, which warns that there is just a 12-year window to avert catastrophe, was met with silence at the White House, and President Trump didn’t mention it as he traveled to Florida, which is particularly vulnerable to rising seas and bigger storms.

Plans for deception in 2016 race

Those were code names used by Psy-Group, an Israeli intelligence firm assigned to make online plans to sway the 2016 presidential election in Mr. Trump’s favor.

The person who requested those plans was Rick Gates, a top Trump campaign official who wanted ways to use fake online personas, social media manipulation and intelligence to help the candidate, according to interviews and copies of the proposals reviewed by The Times.

A 2-year-old’s day in court

Fernanda Jacqueline Davila has big eyes, pigtails, and legs too short to dangle from her chair in a New York immigration courtroom. A relative brought her to the U.S. from Honduras, and now her grandparents want her back.

They are caught between forces beyond their control: an administration determined to discourage immigration; the flow of children journeying alone from Central America; the ramifications of last summer’s family-separation crisis; and a new government policy that makes it difficult for relatives to claim children from federal custody.

Disappearance in Istanbul shakes Saudis

Jamal Khashoggi, a prominent critic of the Saudi leadership, has not been seen since he entered the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on Tuesday. The case has shaken Saudi dissidents abroad, who fear Riyadh is reaching across borders to keep its citizens in line.

Margaret Kivelson, a physicist who turns 90 this month, has been an active part of nearly every major NASA voyage beyond the asteroid belt for four decades. She transformed the way the space agency pokes around for signs of alien oceans.

Michael Wines, a national correspondent, recommends this from Aeon: “Toss a baseball, and you can predict with precision where it will land. Shoot photons at a wall with two slits, however, and you get a different result — wondrous, illogical, impossible, a little terrifying — that calls into question the very nature of existence. This pellucid examination of the central mystery of quantum physics is a great read, accessible even by those of us, like me, who still can’t calculate a square root.”

Back Story

That was just one of Ms. Ingalls’s many aerial achievements. The same year, she completed 714 barrel rolls — a stunt combining a roll and a loop — breaking the world record. In March 1934, she became the first American woman to fly around South America.

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Laura Ingalls was a highly successful female pilot of the 1930s.CreditTimes Wide World Photos

“I wish someone would wake me up and tell me it’s true,” she said after cruising over the Andes.